Wal-Mart: Hiring the healthy

An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors recommended ways for the company to keep spending costs down, the New York Times reported. Among the suggestions: find ways to discourage unhealthy people from working there.

In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years’ seniority earn more than workers with one year’s seniority, but are no more productive.

To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”

Now, I have nothing against employee exercise programs, but Wal-Mart is the last place on earth where checkers need to be doing other jobs. There are never enough of them in first place.

The irony, of course, is that the rest of us already shoulder a good portion of the health care expenses for Wal-Mart employees. As the company itself acknowledges, 46 percent of the children of its employees are on Medicaid or uninsured, the Times reported.

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If Walmart is serious about hiring “healthy” employees, they’d better begin performing dietary assessments on younger applicants and workers — because all the fast-food garbage these people consume in enormous quantities isn’t really conducive to any sort of “health.”

I would encourage Walmart’s CEO and upper management take M. Susan Chambers’ advice and get busy pushing those carts in. Suzy? I want to see you down here in Houston pushing them in on a 95 degree day.

This is just evil. Sam, if you were still alive I think you’d be horrified to see what has happened to your company.

A 55-year-old friend of mine hired on last year as a part-time Wal-Mart cashier here in Virginia. He had to quit after two weeks because of the pain he was experiencing from standing on bare concrete floors for several hours a day with no chance to sit down or move around. He said that even employees in their twenties were suffering from foot and back problems because of the store’s poor ergonomics and heavy physical workloads (for the non-cashiers). Wal-Mart is too cheap to even put rubber pads or carpet runners down for the cashiers to stand on.

Considering that well over 50% of the U.S. population is officially overweight, Wal-Mart is going to have a very hard time finding enough skinny young people to fill the ranks of its workers. I think this is the last straw for me. From now on, I will only shop at Target when I need a discount store. They at least appear to treat their workers fairly, and they have better merchandise as well.

As other posters have said, this is just one more reason for informed consumers (and wage earners) to avoid Wal-Mart like the plague. Even their best PR efforts seem to backfire on the company. If I need something and the only place to buy it is Wal-Mart, then I will do without.

Weird. I guess I’m the only one who realizes this is just one more example of MSM “spin.”

The Left’s answer to everything is, of course, “more government.” The fact is, however, that healthcare costs are going up, and one way to handle the curve is PROACTIVELY: Hire people who are not going to represent higher costs for healthcare.

I just got a new job. They gave me a physical, just like they do everyone else. It’s part of their initiative to keep down insurance costs.

Guess they’re “evil,” though, huh?

(FWIW, the fat-heads who keep carping about the “low wages” at Wal-Mart are either ignorant or liars.

Wal-Mart’s wages are in line with everyone else’s for the type jobs. I don’t know of ANYONE who hires part-time stockers at $20 an hour, do you?

I am going against the grain, but the public and their employees will dictate the direction of Walmart. This isn’t the Soviet Union, nor is it France. If employees don’t like the direction of their employer, they can find work in an environment and with a boss that fits their needs. Consumers have made Walmart the largest retailer in the world and someone else (Target, etc.) will always be looking to outcompete them in an open market. Including going after good employees.

Just so everybody is aware of this, the NYT of course got that memo from someone involved in the national union effort — being lead by a coalition that includes the ***public employee unions*** — to smash WalMart.

All those public votes attempting to keep Wal Marts from being built were orchestrated by the unions with of course tremendous help from the public employee unions, so don’t think this effort is some kind of grass roots effort started by people who sack groceries or stock shelves. It’s political crap and it is being lead by the most politicized union leaders in the country. ( The public employee unions became the majority in the AFL-CIO quite some time ago and the president of the AFL-CIO is one of them.)

I am a former Union construction man and my late father was an all-Union industrial contractor in Texas City, so don’t mistake my criticism of these political leaders of the public employee unions for critcism of other Unions.

I am just getting sick of the extremist politics they try to shove down our throats, and so are a lot of other people.

These are people who live off the taxpayers, to put it another way every Union family that works in private industry is taxed to death to pay the salaries for these guys.

This is why several unions have broken away from the AFL-CIO recently, to pursue genuine union business and not the politics of the public employee union leaders.